Who'll be the veep?

Steve Chapman looks at the possible choices for Barack Obama and John McCain when it comes to who else'll be on their respective tickets:

People who are under the influence of alcohol often are seized with impulses that seem brilliant at the time but end up looking like horrible mistakes the next day. We are now at the stage of the presidential election when intoxication at the prospect of the fall campaign produces ideas that, if adopted, will lead only to regret.

One came in an article on the influential op-ed page of The Washington Post, proposing a simple way to reconcile Hillary Clinton and her supporters to Barack Obama's looming victory. "It's likely that the next president will face at least one Supreme Court vacancy," wrote James Andrew Miller, formerly an aide to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. "Obama should promise Hillary Clinton, now, that if he wins in November, the vacancy will be hers, making her first on a list of one."

In Miller's view, it would guarantee a quick Senate confirmation, gratify her supporters by assuring her life tenure in a job more consequential than vice president and add a solid liberal vote to a conservative-leaning court.

No doubt. But it would brand Obama as an unsavory deal-maker willing to bribe a rival for her blessing, badly tarnishing the rationale of his candidacy. It would also give Republicans a matchless opportunity in the fall campaign — trumpeting the specter of an Obama presidency and a Clinton court.

There'd be no escape from the Spanish Inquisition judicial activism under those circumstances. That would be perhaps the best way for the Democrats to rally wavering Republican supporters behind McCain.